“I’m with you Burke,” Cass spoke quickly. “You didn’t come back here alone. Now move!”
He dived off the tank and sprinted to the broken road. The drone’s core slapped against his back with each bounding step but he ignored it, urging his legs to run as fast as he could. The corpses of the two dross he had killed were still around the tunnels at the base of the slope. The sound of screeching came from near them and he hunched down, sliding for a moment before he launched with the full force of the armor’s legs. He was propelled high over the holes and sailed up the slope, landing hard near the top and sending a wave of rubble from every direction at his feet. He immediately jumped again, with less force, and landed where the road above him still remained intact.
He felt something against his side and he whipped around, ready to slash at whatever was near him. He found nothing when he turned and stood there, confused for a moment before he felt it again. He turned his head and saw the drone’s core at his hip, now whirling to life and shuddering as its cooling mechanisms began to work to maintain its processing.
“What?” he blurted before he turned back to the street. The aliens were already clambering up the slope toward him. He didn’t have time to waste.
“I don’t know what it’s doing,” Cass said. “I’m still connected to it but I don’t understand. It’s collecting data now.”
Burke’s feet slammed into the worn pavement and sent echoes through the broken street with each step. He had been so careful to stay quiet on the way to the drone and he now made a thundering racket on his way back. The aliens he had passed while they slept were awake and waiting for him. Cass painted each of them with a target reticule and he fired without stopping. She locked the shoulder joints of the armor each time he braced to fire, steadying his arms perfectly to line up each shot. He swayed the rifle between each new target, squeezing off two or three shots into each head, clearing the way forward and the main dross force behind him swept the street like a tidal wave.
“The core is collecting data on the dross now? After all this time?” he roared out between firing the rifle.
“No,” she said. “It’s monitoring us.”
“What?”
“It’s recording us. It’s recording our fight with the dross. It’s watching us, not them.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Is it broken?”
“I can’t tell.”
Questions flooded into his head but he pushed them aside, growling as another group of three dross came into the street in front of him. He shifted his rifle between them, letting loose the final bullets in the magazine and putting two of them to the ground. He didn’t have time to stop or to reload. He threw the rifle away and charged ahead, swinging his arms forward with a burst of speed to meet the dross head on.
The alien leaped into the air and he had no firearm to kill it before it jumped at him. He launched himself to meet it instead, springing from the street and twisting his right arm to lead forward with the blade. He smacked into the dross in midair, skewering it through its chest before they fell straight down. He landed on top of the creature and the blade was driven deeper into its body when they hit the ground. He retracted the blade without confirming the kill. He left it dead or dying as he rolled back onto his feet. The rushing swarm was closer behind him now that he had been slowed down.
“How far are we from the ship?” he asked when he had regained his run. His left leg felt like it was on fire from the stress of running with the armor, while his right augmented leg felt perfectly fine. The difference between the two made it somehow worse, with each step his left leg took, as if the straining pain was fresh and new each time.
“We’re close,” she answered and lit up a new marker on the visor’s display, highlighting the ship’s location.
The streets shifted under his feet as he ran. He could hear new holes emerging behind him, with more aliens falling in line with those chasing him. More and more the ground was disturbed as he ran. Sometimes the road itself would heave and move, as a dross dug out of its burrow and was temporarily halted by an undamaged piece of the road. He would hop out of the way from those rising indentations in the street, bulging upwards like a great bubble ready to burst open.
He pushed himself forward with a final spurt of energy when he saw the small building and their ship on top of it, undisturbed by the aliens around them. He turned as he neared the building and saw the dross only a few meters behind him, already chomping their jaws together and trampling over each other to get closer to him. He slowed for a moment and launched himself upward in the same second, catapulting himself directly upward rather than a forward leap. He landed cleanly on top of the building and felt the walls below him shudder as the herd of aliens crashed into it, flooding around it at all sides and scraping their claws into the walls to climb up to him.
Cass lowered the ship’s doors and fired up the engines as Burke ran across the roof. He felt a wave of relief when he first set foot on the ship but he tried to ignore it, knowing how much complacency could cost him if he relaxed before he was truly safe. He stood in the cargo hold and watched anxiously as the dross clambered onto the roof and slouched their way to him. He felt the ship begin to move and the doors began to close. There were only a handful of the aliens on the roof. One was closer than the others. The ship lifted from the roof as the doors were nearly fully raised. Two claws clamped over the rim and one of the dross pulled itself over and dropped down in front of him just as the doors closed.
A flood of anger replaced the relief he had been resisting. The alien’s strength were always in their numbers, he repeated a third time. Here was a lone alien challenging him, and the animalistic naivety of the race that claimed his home made him flare up in a rage. The armor that shielded him now had come into his possession too late to save his home, and the bitterness of that realization came with the crashing release of everything that had happened since the war. Adam’s betrayal, being stranded, and Havard’s apparent lies; that manipulation stung the most then, as part of him had been tricked into thinking he was finally able to help his home planet, a trick he had vowed never to fall for again.
There was a single alien in front of him, snarling its rows of teeth and whipping its bunched tails around his ship. He stepped forward without another gun and without releasing his blades. He stepped forward and punched with the full force of the aegis’s strength in his right arm. The dross went to bite him, and its teeth scraped harmlessly over his armor. He felt no joy in how impervious he was to the attacks of a lone, cornered dross. He punched again, and again, then pummelled the flinching creature with his feet after it fell to the floor. He brought his knee down on its neck, ignoring the slashing of its tails against his back as he did so, and slammed his fist harder into its head. Its skull fractured and then broke apart, spilling its flesh and bloodied insides onto the ship’s floor. He didn’t stop until the alien’s tails went limp.
“Burke. Burke,” Cass repeated softly. He had no idea how long she had been trying to get his attention.
He stood and released the faceplate on his helmet. His face was contorted with anger. He breathed slowly and deeply.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured as he turned from the mess he had made.
“It’s okay. I understand,” she said, and continued to talk to him, trying to distract him, as he walked farther into the ship.
* * *
Cass stayed silent while Burke removed his aegis. She said nothing while he wiped the armor clean of blood and dirt. His movements were slow and methodical, as though he was losing himself in the repetition of the act.
She reflected on her lie as she watched him. She was often baffled by his actions and didn’t understand why he would sometimes get so angry. She kept watch over the mangled corpse of the dross in the cargo hold while simultaneously watching Burke. She loathed lying to him, even if it was a tiny lie, but hated seeing him suffer in emotional turmoil even more. She soothed him and then kept watch, ready to spea
k up again if necessary.
Burke reassembled the aegis in the armory after it was cleaned, leaving it unceremoniously in the middle of the room. He worked on cleaning his augmented leg next, scrubbing at it like it was just another piece of the aegis. He showered afterwards, washing the build up of sweat from running his body so strenuously on the planet. Cass thought he appeared calmer when he took his seat at the helm of the ship. His face immediately tensed when he saw that they were still high in Earth’s orbit, as though he had forgotten where he was. She changed the main screen to display the collected data from the recovered drone, blocking his view of the planet.
“I’ve went over the information several times,” she explained without his prompting. “I still can’t find any data collected on the dross except for what it monitored during our battle.”
“Why did it do that? Why did it start recording our fight?”
“I don’t know, Burke,” she said gently. “The drone was heavily damaged in the fall. Maybe it was damaged further during our run back to the ship. Maybe it was a glitch or maybe it was intentional. Maybe the drone collected data on the dross before but it was lost in the crash. Maybe when it sensed them again when we recovered it, it started gathering data once more. There are too many questions and variables. I don’t know the answer.”
“So you’re saying we have no way to know if Havard lied to us?”
“ Yes.”
“Brilliant,” he said acidly. “Fucking brilliant. Is there anyway this data could be linked to the weapon he showed us?”
“Possibly,” Cass said. “The changes to the planet’s ecosystem and climate could be relevant to the release of a biological weapon like the one he showed us. I can’t be certain without more information on the weapon.”
“No answers there either,” Burke shook his head. “What should we do then? I can’t tell if I’m feeling betrayed because of Adam or if because Havard has legitimately fucked with us. Should we give him back the drone? Should we give a copy to Viscard? Tell me what to do, Cass.”
A moment passed in silence. Cass was stunned. The big decisions were always discussed and ended with a mutual agreement. Once again, she couldn’t understand his actions but was overwhelmed with sympathy for him. She hated to admit that he was right: he was too biased to make an objective decision.
“I think we should do both,” she said clearly. “Havard wasn’t clear with us, but that’s not enough to incriminate him. There’s nothing questionable on the drone that Viscard couldn’t find out himself. I think we can safely do both.”
She watched as Burke exhaled a long breath and relaxed in his chair. He said or asked nothing as he prepared the data for transmitting. He hailed Viscard over the same channel he had received before and then sat back, waiting for a response. A reply came back within a few minutes and Burke let his hand hover for a moment over the terminal, ready to bridge the connection.
“Thank you Cass,” he said before he lowered his hand and the older man appeared on the main display.
“I didn’t expect to hear from you again,” Viscard said, eyes narrowed.
“Why? Did you think I’d die down there, or that I’d fly away without messaging you?”
“Whichever one makes you feel better.”
“Ha,” Burke shook his head. “I’m sending you the data but I think you’ll be disappointed. There’s nothing important on it that we could find.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Viscard replied, looking once again at Burke as though he was a riddle he couldn’t solve. “How do I know you didn’t strip part of the data away from this? How can I trust this is authentic?”
“You can’t,” Burke replied simply. “You only have my word.”
“The word of a man with a fake name,” Viscard’s voice rose. “Although you did survive for hours on the planet. Maybe you really did fight in the war. What was your name?”
“Goodbye Admiral,” Burke smiled.
“I’ll be seeing you again, Jack.”
Burke leaned back in his chair. Cass kept the screen dark, still blocking his view of the planet.
“Do you want to contact Havard now?” she asked. “It might take a while for him to respond.”
“No. He won’t explain anything. He wants the drone physically back in his hands. Even face to face he won’t tell me a thing. You said you’re going to try to get into their network. We’ll have to wait and see what you find. Focus on information about other AIs above all else, though. You’re more important than whatever Havard is doing.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said firmly.
“Of course you will. We’re making sure of it.”
He sat up in the chair and placed his hands on the terminal. He thought of contacting someone else, and his fingers rested on the keyboard. He thought of Natalie and how she wanted to talk to him and the possible answers she might have. He typed the beginning of her name and then immediately erased it. He shook his head.
He cleared the helm’s display and gave a final look at Earth before leaving it behind. He could see the boundary of night and day on the surface. The part of the planet in its night cycle was lost in the darkness. For a few hours he had been the lone, singular human on Earth. He took no comfort or pride in that thought and turned his head away as he turned the ship around.
The following is the first scene from the next in the Bounty Hunter series: Reckoning, the finale of Series One.
Burke Monrow was unaware of the intruder on his ship. He and Cass, his AI partner, had been docked inside a space station for over a month. They were waiting on the delivery of their new ship, one they had spent the last year saving for, and Burke was becoming impatient. He paced back and forth at the helm and spoke with Cass.
“How long until it gets here?”
“Three days,” she answered tersely, her voice emitting from the ship’s walls as fluidly as any person’s. “That’s one less day than when you asked me yesterday.”
“I’m annoying you,” he stated.
“Only a little.”
He sat at the main computer console and brought up the purchase invoice for the new ship. Over ten million credits, nearly all of the money they had, was ready to be transferred once the ship arrived. It would leave them with a meager amount left in savings but they had managed to keep the current ship they used as a backup. They had disagreed about that. They had disagreed about a lot of things when picking out the new ship.
“We should still sell this one,” Cass argued.
“And what if we crash? We should always have a spare.”
“It will cost us a lot every month to keep a second ship at port. We should save the money instead, and only buy another ship if we ever need it.”
He shook his head. Cass huffed.
“Fine,” she conceded. “I still say we should have included extra bedrooms in the ship’s layout. You don’t know what we’ll need in the future.”
“We’ll never need those,” he said firmly. “It’ll be just the two of us. No one else will ever step onto this ship unless I have them in chains for a bounty.”
The intruder shifted silently in the lower level of the ship, in the engine room. Burke didn’t hear a thing, and Cass’s focus was solely on him. She had checked the ship’s doors when they last re-entered the ship and had seen no record of unauthorized access. She felt as secure as Burke did in their home.
The main screen at the helm abruptly changed to display an incoming message. Burke sat up and straightened his back before he accepted the connection. Havard’s face appeared on the screen and he nodded a greeting to Burke. They had worked together many times in the past but only twice in the last year; still, they had been the most lucrative jobs of that time. Over a third of the cost of the new ship had come from Havard and ACU, the branch of the human government that he ran.
“Another job already?” Burke asked as he looked up at the screen.
“Actually, no. Something else.”
Burke tilted his head
. Havard had never been social and only ever contacted him about business. The abnormality of it bothered him.
“I have a gift for you,” Havard explained. “You recently ordered a new ship.” He immediately raised his hand as if to halt Burke. “Please, don’t insult me by asking how I found out. The delivery will be delayed by two days from now. I had something sent to the shipyard and installed for you.”
“What is it?”
“A present,” Havard smiled. “You’ll have to wait and see for yourself. Think of it as a token to commemorate us once again working with each other toward common goals. Speaking of that, I have a request. Do try to keep what I’ve said in mind.”
Burke braced himself. Nothing was ever given freely from ACU. They were always equal in their transactions. He had purchased both his power armor and Cass from their facilities, both at a fair price. The fact that Havard had decided to break that trend set him on edge.
“Last time we spoke,” Havard began, “I offered to purchase back the AI we sold you.”
“The answer is still no,” Cass said loudly.
“I have a new proposal,” Havard continued, as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “I offered you six hundred million credits and a replacement AI unit. Instead, one hundred million credits just for a copy. A full copy of your ship’s systems to be sure we save every file of the AI.”
Burke scrunched his eyes. He knew how much Cass would be annoyed that Havard refused to use her name when he addressed her. He tried to put himself into her position and didn’t envy her decision. For all intents and purposes, the money being offered was free. A copy would mean nothing was lost or taken for the payment. The only question was how the copy would be treated and used, and if Cass could accept those consequences.
The Bounty Hunter: Into The Swarm Page 7